Is PR Worth the Effort?

Introduction:

This week, William Vanderbloemen says good public relations is absolutely worth the time and money. Paul Downs says PR hasn’t worked for him. At this point, he says, there are all kinds of ways he’d rather spend his time and money. Meanwhile, Sarah Segal, who owns a PR firm, offers some tips on how to approach and how to employ a firm effectively. Along the way, we discuss what’s expensive when it comes to PR and whether owners can just do it themselves. Plus: Paul explains how he dug himself out of a sales hole by not doing anything differently. And we find out how the owners feel about all of the new ways they’re being asked to leave tips.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Paul Downs is CEO of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers.

Sarah Segal is CEO of Segal Communications.

William Vanderbloemen is founder and CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Paul, Sarah, and William. I appreciate you taking the time. I want to start today with an article I recently highlighted in the Morning Report. It was based on the anonymous comments of a PR agency insider, who basically argued that PR firms need better PR. It said that many firms are too focused on getting that first retainer check, and they don’t spend enough time talking strategy and setting expectations with their clients.

Sarah, we’ve talked about some of these issues a little bit in previous episodes, but I just wanted to give you a chance to respond to this. I certainly don’t want to put you on the spot to answer for all of public relations any more than I’d want to answer for all of journalism, heaven knows. But I’m wondering if you found the piece credible?

Sarah Segal:
I did not. To me, it read like a disgruntled employee that doesn’t get to have say over the biz development that the person’s senior executives handle, and is disgruntled about his or her or their—

Loren Feldman:
I think the person was identified as a male.

Sarah Segal:
Okay, him. Yeah, honestly, it was a rant. For a communications person, honestly, they did not articulate their points very clearly to me. That said, there are a couple of things in there I agree that is an industry problem, in general, about people coming into and seeking PR when they’re not ready for it. And even my agency has had that problem where you go through the whole RFP process, you land the client, and then you realize when you’re in the onboarding segment, that they don’t have a lot of the foundational items that they need to really go big and leverage PR. But you don’t necessarily know that when you’re pitching and working on getting a client on board. So you kind of, after the fact, realize, “Okay, these guys don’t really have all their ducks in a row in order for us to do an effective PR campaign.”

Loren Feldman:
William, do you have any or much experience hiring public relations firms?

William Vanderbloemen:
I don’t know what any or much is, but I’m on my fourth one.

Loren Feldman:
Okay.

William Vanderbloemen:
And not because I keep hiring the wrong one. I just hate paying the retainers. I keep thinking, “Golly, the world of information is flat.” The idea that somebody can call a friend and get you a placement should be dead by now with the internet, but it’s really not.

Loren Feldman:
Could you explain that, William? Why should that be dead?

William Vanderbloemen:
I don’t know, Loren, you and I are old enough—maybe Paul, not Sarah—to remember the word Rolodex. You know, that’s why you hired a search firm. They’ve got a great Rolodex, or to go all Heidi Fleiss, a little black book. Everybody’s got the same Rolodex now. It’s LinkedIn. Like, I can get anybody’s number. I don’t have to call a switchboard to get through.

Loren Feldman:
I bet Sarah has contacts that she makes use of.

Sarah Segal:
Well, here’s the thing. It’s not about the contacts anymore, because we all know that the number of people being laid off at news outlets is atrocious right now. So there’s a constant churn and turnover of the right people at the right outlet. What it is, is about an understanding of how to work with reporters; an understanding of their deadlines; an understanding of the things that they’re looking for, the assets; the understanding of getting items to them in a fashion where it doesn’t make more work for them.

We actually do something that’s really abnormal for most PR agencies. We provide our clients with our media lists. They have full access to them. They can look at their emails. And honestly, we’ve had people ask us whether or not we worry about those clients going off and trying to do their own PR, and they never do, because it’s a lot of work. It’s not about just emailing Loren at The New York Times and saying, “Hey, cover me.” That’s not going to get you a story. What it is, is about cultivating the right angle that meets the segment of whatever they’re looking to cover and appeals to them as a writer. And most businesses don’t have the bandwidth, time, or understanding of the industry to do that.

Loren Feldman:
William, in those situations that you were describing, did you feel as though you were on the same page with the firms you hired, that expectations were set appropriately before the contract was signed?

William Vanderbloemen:
Some better than others. I think what I have probably wrongly assumed is, it’s easier to find people and get in touch with them so PR wasn’t necessary. But every time I hire a good PR firm—a good one—we end up growing. And the part of me that is Dutch, which is allergic to overhead, is like, “Golly, do we really have to write that check?” But every time we do, with a good one, we grow.

The very first firm I hired was a firm that was recommended to me from my attorney, who also represents a lot of our clients. And it’s a guy up on Times Square, and he’s got a fairly good size firm—and not one of them is a Christian. And I’m sitting here trying to market a book on pastoral succession in Christian churches. That was the reason we hired the firm. It was like, “Let’s go get our name out there,” and that sort of a thing. And I thought, “There’s no way these guys are going to even understand what I’m doing.” And when we started, I just talked to him on the phone, or whatever. And they finally said, “If you’ll come up here, and sit down with us, and figure out a strategy, we can get this done.” And they were absolutely right.

Loren Feldman:
William, if you had doubts about whether they could do it, why did you hire them?

William Vanderbloemen:
Because my attorney told me to, and he’s pretty smart.

Sarah Segal:
Well, isn’t it Bill Gates who said that if he had $1 left, he would spend it on PR? The problem with a lot of PR or when people are hiring agencies, some of them go in thinking it’s going to be the Band-Aid or the fix that is going to change their bottom line. And PR and building brand credibility takes time.

You’re not going to become the sweetheart overnight. It rarely ever works like that. And people are impatient. We’ve had people be, like, “Well, we really want to be in The New York Times within the first three months of the relationship. Can you guarantee that?” First of all, we don’t guarantee anything. We guarantee you that we will provide transparency. We guarantee that we will regularly pitch you out. We guarantee that we will literally guide you along to everything that we’re doing in our activities. But sometimes your story won’t stick.

Loren Feldman:
Paul, do you have any or much experience hiring public relations firms?

Paul Downs:
None. But I did manage to get in The New York Times first try, so… [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
How’d you do that?

Paul Downs:
I called a guy. It was crazy. He paid me. It was amazing.

Loren Feldman:
Actually, I think you emailed him first.

Paul Downs:
Emailed him first. Yeah. So, I’m sorry, Sarah, William, you guys just went about it the wrong way. [Laughter]

William Vanderbloemen:
So, I’ll say, Loren, looking at the article from this recent Morning Report, one of the things it outlined was lack of a strategy session. And I learned from my PR firm, the first one I hired: Let’s do a strategy session. And it worked. Now, they were very expensive. And we used them for a campaign, like a six-month campaign leading up to the launch of the book. I think one of the things that helped was, I positioned my job for that six months as to be on call, if they needed it. Like, the pope opened a Twitter account one day, and they needed commentary for Fast Company within the next hour. “Okay, I got it.” So I think I had to learn that it’s not just them. If they need it done right away, I need to make them the priority to make it work. And I don’t know, Sarah, if that’s true from your perspective. But—

Sarah Segal:
Yeah, you have to make the reporters a priority. And we’ve had where people are like, “Well, sorry, I don’t have time to talk to that reporter today.” And we’re like, “Are you kidding me?” Like, you have to bend over backwards. Otherwise, they’re never going to call you back. I have a question. Can you walk through, what was your strategy session with them? I’m very curious as to what—

Loren Feldman:
William, before you answer that, did you have that session before you hired them or after you hired them?

William Vanderbloemen:
After. One of the best book titles I’ve seen in a long time is the Covey book, The Speed of Trust. I trust my attorney, and he told me a few people who these guys had worked with around their books, and I knew the results. I’m like, “Okay, fine. I’ll hire them.” And then we did the strategy.

Sarah Segal:
So how did you go about developing that strategy?

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, first of all, them learning what in the world I do. I mean, this is not anything other than a point of data. But every partner in the firm was a Jewish guy who had no idea, like, “So how does a pastor get hired? What is that all about? And what are you trying to do?” And we were a brand new idea to the church—forget people who didn’t go to church. So they just needed to understand, like, “Who are you marketing to? Who do you want to reach? What persona are you trying [to use]?”

So they had to understand what we were doing, and who we were selling to, before they really said, “Okay, now I get it.” And for me, it was: I know how to write content for pastors for headmasters of Christian schools, for CEOs of nonprofits. The real trick is, how do you write content that will reach board members who are in any number of different industries? And that’s where we went to the PR firms and said, “We need the business community to recognize us for what we do.” And they did a great job. They just charged a bunch of money. And we were so much smaller then. And we said, “We’ll do a six-month campaign, and that’ll be it.” They’re still doing great. I think they’re still growing and doing quite well, and we stay in touch.

I’ve used PR firms when I’ve written a book. The next book we wrote, we decided to go with a smaller group that was a little less expensive, that, frankly, had connections in the church world. And it wasn’t very good at all. And, you know, it may just be that you get what you pay for. It wasn’t a bad person, but we just got very few placements. And we were a much more reputable, larger, well-known company at the time.

Third firm we hired was just on a one-off. It was people who were uniquely placed for a brief season of time, where I had great access to their contacts. And it worked great for that season of time. But when they changed jobs, it all changed. That’s a pretty nebulous answer. But you know, we’re putting a book out this fall, which I think is going to be pretty amazing. And it’s a business book, so I did a targeted search for: Who are the best business book PR firms out there? And made a decision.

Loren Feldman:
Wait, you didn’t go back to the ones you were happy with last time?

William Vanderbloemen:
No, because this is not marketing toward Christians at all. There’s not one Christian reference in it. It’s a leadership book, and it’ll go to the larger business public, like the Daniel Pink, Adam Grant kind of audience. And I want to—

Loren Feldman:
So you think the non-Christians at the firm you used last time to market to Christians won’t be able to help you with this one, which is not aimed at Christians?

Sarah Segal:
It’s because they were expensive. How much is expensive?

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, isn’t that a great question? You know, I talked to them. I mean, this was eight years ago when I used them. They’ve really pivoted more toward consumer goods. And they could work with us, but it would not be their specialty. So I’m like, “Well, who is the best at marketing business books in that really small space?” and made a decision based on that.

Sarah Segal:
Going back to the question of being expensive, like what is expensive to you, in terms of book PR?

William Vanderbloemen:
If it’s costing me more than it would cost me to hire a really great top-level employee, then that’s a lot.

Sarah Segal:
How much would a top-level employee cost?

William Vanderbloemen:
I’m not gonna go that far.

Paul Downs:
C’mon, it’s gonna be north of 100 grand, right?

William Vanderbloemen:
It’s well over a six-figure line item on the budget. Put it that way.

Sarah Segal:
Okay, I’m sorry. I like to know these things.

Loren Feldman:
So does everybody who’s listening, Sarah. And I’m curious, do you think that sounds like a lot, too?

Sarah Segal:
No, I mean, honestly, when you hire an agency, the benefit that you get is you get a team of people, you get access to all of the tools that we use. We have media databases. We can pull your TV appearances. So you’re not just getting the headcount, you’re getting access to a full suite of research and data that we have available.

But people don’t want to pay for PR. I get a lot of people with sticker shock when I talk to them, just because they don’t understand that there’s a lot of stuff that happens in the background that they may not be aware of, these tools that we invest in to do it. But I did have one question for you: I want to know, when you said that you researched and looked for PR agencies that are good at doing new books, how did you go about that? Is it through referral or Googling or?

William Vanderbloemen:
A little bit of everything. I mean, I stalk for a living. So it’s as random as—this sounds awful, but—literally, running into Malcolm Gladwell at dinner, to, “All right, who does Daniel Pink use? Who does Adam Grant use? Who does—” and just try and do a convergence around it. Maybe it’s because I run a really niche business that I’m a believer in the niches. But I was just wondering, is there a firm or two that, this is who those guys all go to? Like, they know that one thing.

Loren Feldman:
Wait, did you go up to his table and ask him who his PR person is?

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, I’m not gonna go into the conversation, but yes, I did. I am that guy. We have a number of mutual friends who he’s done podcasts with and for, and so it was fine.

Sarah Segal:
So if you’re going to the places that people in your same space go to, what incentivizes a PR person to pitch you as an expert, or Malcolm as an expert? Like, that’s the problem. If you all know the same person, like you’re—

William Vanderbloemen:
I beg to differ, Sarah. It’s about when books get released. They’re not going to pick me if they’ve got an author who has the same launch date. This is all about building a campaign around a book and a concept. And Malcolm Gladwell is not going to present himself as an expert on spotting talent and what talented people end up showing as their traits.

Sarah Segal:
But you asked that question when you’re vetting them, right?

William Vanderbloemen:
Absolutely.

Sarah Segal:
Okay.

Loren Feldman:
I want to go back to Paul for a second. Paul, you mentioned that you haven’t hired PR firms, but you have gotten in touch with reporters, and if people didn’t realize it, you were actually referring to me at The New York Times.

You sent me an email. And I have to say, I responded because it was a very unusual email. It was very genuine, and you told me things that business owners often don’t want to talk about, including the fact that your business was not doing well and that I might be interested because you would be willing to talk about what it’s like to go through bankruptcy. Happily, you didn’t end up having to do that. But that was the start of our relationship. William, similarly, we had a mutual friend who introduced us, and we wound up having lunch, which led to you writing for me at Forbes. First, Paul, did you consider hiring a firm before doing that?

Paul Downs:
All right, I don’t think that my experience is replicable. So we could tell the story all day. [Laughter]

Sarah Segal:
I don’t think so either. But I do think what you did was, you gave a reporter access to the bad stuff, which is what most people try to insulate themselves from. You were willing to say, “All right, I’m going to show you what’s going on under the hood.” And that’s what reporters want. So yeah, you can do your own PR, if you’re willing to show your cards. A reporter’s gonna say, “Yeah, if you can give me unprecedented access, we’ve got a relationship.”

Loren, I’m sure you and I met because I probably pitched you 100 times before we even connected in real life. But it’s about, we’re constantly trying to get our clients to reveal what’s under the hood, because we know that’s going to be interesting to them. So yeah, what you did, you can replicate that, but you have to be willing to do that.

Paul Downs:
Well, there also has to be an intersection between what’s being offered and the time that it’s being desired. No, I’ve never tried to hire PR people. But I’ve had various… I remember when I was very young, somebody called me once from, I think it was the Wall Street Journal, and said, “Hey, I want to write a story about people who were working on Wall Street and left to start woodworking businesses to fulfill their lives.” And I said, “Well, that sounds interesting, but I never worked on Wall Street.” And so, click.

And then there was another time after I started writing for The Times when someone wanted me to comment—this was from, I think CNN—and they wanted me to be in New York in like 30 minutes or something to comment. And I was like, “I can’t do that.” And I didn’t even get it out of my mouth before the phone went down. So I think that just because you have an interesting story doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to know where to direct it and whether that approach is going to land at the right moment. And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t think that my story is replicable. It was just an astonishing piece of luck, and Loren, your question of like, “Hey, I’m two weeks from failure. I’ll hire a PR firm.” Like that doesn’t even make any sense. I didn’t have two pennies to rub together.

Loren Feldman:
You’re right. It doesn’t make any sense to ask you why you didn’t hire a PR firm.

Paul Downs:
Like, who would do that? Anybody who would do that would have failed years before I did.

Loren Feldman:
But I do agree with Sarah that your experience there was replicable, because you offered something that was likely to get a response from a journalist.

Paul Downs:
Well, I didn’t know that.

Sarah Segal:
Paul, your experience of getting these inbound requests from reporters and them hanging up on you, because you couldn’t do it—when I was a reporter, you do the whoever-calls-back- first wins sometimes, because you’re on deadline. You’re trying to find somebody to talk about a specific subject that is trending in the news. And, Paul, if you don’t have the time to do it, or the background appropriate, they’re just gonna hang up and move on to the next person, because that’s the demands of their job.

Paul Downs:
Yeah, after it happened to me once or twice, I was like, “I get it.” These people are busy. They’ve got 24 hours of content to produce every day, and they’re not gonna mess around.

Sarah Segal:
What you can do if you want to establish that relationship is go, “No, I can’t, but I can connect you with this person who can,” because if you can maintain that relationship and provide them an avenue to connect with somebody else, they’re going to continue to want to connect with you. Because you’ve been useful to them.

Paul Downs:
Well, okay, is that a good use of my time? That’s probably almost always no. And so as a small business owner, you’ve got to play the percentages. And I’m often presented with possible courses of action that have a low expected payoff per hour of effort. And I just have learned to be like, “Eh, ain’t doing that. I could get a better deal on my trash collection and make more money.” So that’s how I think about it.

Sarah Segal:
It depends on your priorities. If you’re a small tech company, and you think that getting in The New York Times is going to help get more investors to invest in you, then you’re gonna see that that’s a worthwhile effort for you to go about. But your situation may not result in anything. You may not have aspirations for that.

While I have the floor, I just wanted to say one thing about strategy, to go back to that. The one way, I think, the best way to determine whether an agency has an ability to assist you with strategy and help you figure out your target audience, is by looking at their blog. My blog for our company is very specific. Everything we write is written for and curated for the people who may hire us. So it’s written with the CMO, the communications director, or the VP of communications in mind. That is our audience.

I can’t tell you how many blogs are out there, put out by PR agencies that are like, “How to do PR,” “How to get into PR.” And I’m like: Why are you wasting time? Maybe it’s good for recruiting, but really, you should be reaching out to the people who want to hire you by creating content that’s interesting to them and useful to them. My last blog I wrote was about how to put together a good request for proposal so that you’ll be able to get all the details you want from a potential agency. That’s useful to that audience.

Paul Downs:
Well, could I comment that possibly the people who are writing the, what you call, facile blogs are just making an SEO play to try to get their website to show up when people ask that question?

Sarah Segal:
Well, even if they’re doing it just for SEO, do you really want your SEO to be about making your way into PR, getting your first job in PR? That’s not the SEO that you want if you want to use it to drive business. We SEO-optimize all of our blog posts, too, but we’re optimizing it for keywords that are going to gain us visibility with decision makers.

Loren Feldman:
Paul, I want to challenge something you said, when you talked about the relative merits of spending your time talking to a reporter versus trying to get a better deal on trash collection. I really wonder if you’re right about that. I mean, if you got the Wall Street Journal to write about your firm because it makes high-end conference tables that show up in boardrooms all over the country and you’ve done projects for the Pentagon and lots of other high-end places that you could name, I think that might be more valuable to you than a good deal on trash collection. Is that really what you meant?

Paul Downs:
Yeah, and it’s based on experiences I had a long time ago, back in the 80s and 90s, when I was starting out and I would land some feature in the local newspaper, the local lifestyle magazine. And that was very exciting, but it never really actually led to any real work. What has led to work for me is ongoing, regular appearances in places people are looking for the product.

And that took two forms. Prior to 2003: I would just run ads in a local magazine, and that got a response. And after 2003, we stumbled into extremely favorable search results from Google, and that’s there every day. And I just am not as excited anymore about the your day on the front page of this or that, because it just disappears so quickly.

Sarah Segal:
How do you quantify? How did you know that that article didn’t get—every time somebody comes into your shop, do you ask them the question of how they found you?

Paul Downs:
Absolutely. I’ve been doing that since 1987. So yeah, I mean, if there was an immediate bump, I would have known it. And I’ve got data going back decades about the number of inquiries per month and where they come from. And it’s very granular at this point. And I think that one of the things that—I mean, I may be hijacking the show, but—I think it’s very important when you’re a small business to think carefully about what is actually going to move the needle?

Now, press coverage is always exciting. It’s cool to be on the front page, to have your picture. Everybody’s very excited. Your friends see it. But those things may not have the same long-term value as actually sorting out something like trash collection or some other internal process that could deliver you profits in a way that a single shot at press coverage would not do. And so I’m just skeptical about the value of that.

And let me just give you another counterfactual. So I wrote 179 columns in The New York Times over four years. How many people read those, Loren? Millions, probably. I got a total of one job out of that, as far as I could tell. Now, there was utility in having an outbound link from The Times to my site. That really helped our SEO, but in terms of people who just read what I wrote and then wanted to buy a table from me, it was one. And so, if it was just me appearing one day for one story, I don’t think that is generally as valuable as whatever you can set up that’s ongoing, regular, puts your name in front of the people you need all the time.

Sarah Segal:
Well, that’s a PR program. Like a one-hit wonder, getting in The New York Times once is not going to do what you want it to do. You need to have an ongoing PR campaign where you’re constantly reaching out and building backlinks from other outlets. The backlink is king, especially for your SEO, so people can find you. You come up in search when somebody says, “I need a new conference table.” The more backlinks that you have leading your website is going to increase your credibility and give you what you want to do. But even the local newspapers? They have pretty high domain authorities, and getting a backlink from them nowadays is really valuable, but you have to look at it as a cumulative thing. You can’t expect a lot from a one-hit wonder.

Paul Downs:
Okay, well, I’m gonna bow out of using myself as a model of anything, because I don’t think anything about my business experience has been replicable. I got the top search results. Google gave them to me for nothing. I had done nothing at all, never had a backlink to anybody. They just chose a picture on my website one day.

So now, that was 2003, and maybe Google just operates differently. But I’ve had in my business life two remarkable strokes of luck that changed everything. And I did very little for one and nothing for the other. And the very little was writing an email to Loren, which took me 15 minutes, and nothing was being in the right place at the right time for Google. So again, you can ask me the question, and I’m giving you the honest answer of what my experience suggests, which is that PR has not moved the needle for me.

Loren Feldman:
I would point out that the column that you’re talking about, the posts that you wrote, ran in a small business blog in The New York Times that was read primarily by small business owners during the Great Recession and the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession. And that might have had an impact.

Paul Downs:
It might have.

Loren Feldman:
I’m curious, William, you’ve had a similar experience. You’ve written a lot for Forbes—not necessarily being read by your primary customers, your target audience. Do you feel that’s moved the needle for you in any way?

William Vanderbloemen:
One hundred percent.

Loren Feldman:
How so?

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, if I knew how, I’d start a PR firm and charge people for it. [Laughter] I mean, I’ve got some ideas. I do think Sarah could probably speak to this better than me, but one of the decisions that I was not happy with with our business, that the SEO people told me to do, was the naming of our company. I didn’t want it to be named after me. I’ve got a weird name. You guys have heard the story before. The SEO guys are like, “Yeah, but your name is so weird, you can actually misspell it and it’ll come up.” So when I write for Forbes, and my name as an author’s out there, my brand is out there too. So it’s helped a ton.

And I think we’re also a little bit different. We’re not building conference tables. There’s no barrier for entry into search. You just say, “I do search,” hang a shingle, now you’re a search guy. I’ve tried to position our work as thought leadership and not vendor. I’ve tried to say, “We’re a trusted advisor, not a big Rolodex.” And that requires creating content that people view as thought leadership, trusted advice.

The book we wrote on pastoral succession, my mother thought she was gonna have to buy all 12 copies of it. “I mean, are you kidding me? You’re writing a book about—what in the world are you thinking?” I’m like, “Nno, no, this is going to be the book. This is going to be in all of the seminary libraries.” That’s the goal. The goal isn’t to sell a million of them. The goal is to be the trusted resource on this one topic. And it’s really proven to be a huge difference maker.

So I have an unusually dependent relationship on content. And that may not be true if you’re manufacturing tables, or if it’s Jay with frames. I don’t know other businesses. And Loren’s heard me say, “I’ve got a religion and philosophy degree. Most people that have a philosophy degree spend their career saying, ‘Do you want fries with that?’” So I’m not the business guy.

But for me, we’re forever wed to producing good content. And then, if my author name is the same as our brand name, it goes—so when I get a PR placement, like that PR firm, those guys in New York, they got the Chicago Tribune to write a feature in their Sunday edition called “The Rise of the Pastor Search Firm.” Like, how good is that? I was in London for a Tony Robbins conference, and they got me an interview with the BBC in studio. Like, how good is that? It’s made a ton of difference for us, but we probably are a little bit of a weird business.

Loren Feldman:
All right, I want to move to a different topic, but first, I just want to alert all of the philosophy majors out there that they should send their letters directly to William and not to me. I want to go back to Paul. Paul, you may not have hired PR—

William Vanderbloemen:
So you’re not disagreeing with me, Loren.

Loren Feldman:
Well, as the father of a philosophy major, maybe we’ll have to have a conversation offline at some point. Paul, you don’t hire PR firms but you have been spending a decent amount of money on a marketing campaign. Every time you’re on, I ask you if you have anything new to report, and you never disappoint. So I’m going to ask again. Anything new in how that campaign is progressing?

Paul Downs:
There’s been a big hang up that is my fault, which is, part of the introductory research that we conducted with this marketing firm turned up information about our target market—architects and interior designers—which made it clear that our existing website was not a good fit for that market. And since then, we’ve been building a new one, and got to the point where it needed to have all the content loaded and put into it. And I’m sort of a fool, in that I insist on, every word on all my websites should be written well by me. And my current website breaks all those rules, because the web guys wanted to have it written for SEO results, which is fine.

But I’m just finishing up this new website the way I want it. It’s a very different website, and I’m about a week away, but I got very hung up on trying to help my sales team get us out of a sales hole for the last two or three months because we were way behind pace and running out of work. And we’ve recently turned it around, as of yesterday, and I should be finishing up the website either tomorrow or early next week. And then we can resume with the outbound portion of the marketing campaign, which is trying to support or trying to drive traffic to the new website, using what I think is called programmatic advertising. And I have my doubts about it, but I kind of have to let these people have a shot at it. So that’s where we’re at: Delays on my part, but we’re ready to launch very soon.

Loren Feldman:
How did you dig yourself out of the sales hole?

Paul Downs:
I don’t know. We had our best year ever last year, and every day we came in, and we did five things. And we were doing the same five things at the beginning of the year, and they weren’t working. And then we continued to do the same five things because they’ve worked pretty well for the last three decades, and now they’re working again. So I think that it’s maybe just a blip. It may have been some lull in the stream of projects that is a lingering result of the pandemic. But I really couldn’t tell you.

Based on my experiences, everything you do, you try to figure out what works. And eventually you’re going to arrive at stuff that works almost all the time—but it never works all the time. And you get into weird blips where it either works better or worse than it should. And it’s good to know the difference, and to understand whether there’s something you’re doing, or whether everything you’re doing is likely to work at some point, and you should just keep doing it, as opposed to messing around with it.

And that was my thought when we saw sales slowed down at the beginning of the year. Because I thought very hard, like, “Are we doing something different? Are we doing something worse? Or is there something about our pricing?” And I just couldn’t come up with anything that we were doing differently. Everything that we were doing had worked great last year, so I just decided to ride it out. I told my people, “Hey, we’re in a fix. Our backlog’s disappearing, but it’s not gone yet. So we’ve got work to do. Let’s keep going.” And I’ll finally be able to get up in front of them on Monday and say, “See, I told you. We just had to wait around, and now we’ve got the orders we needed.” So take of that what you will.

Loren Feldman:
Sarah or William, have either of you ever been in that kind of position where you’re wondering whether you should keep doing what’s worked in the past or try something different?

Sarah Segal:
I never keep doing the same thing. I’m obsessed with finding efficiencies and doing things differently all the time, which probably also has its faults. But I

Loren Feldman:
Are you talking in general? Or about sales specifically?

Sarah Segal:
About sales. But maybe it’s because I haven’t hit that like one thing that will get us new business. For PR, at least—I think we’ve talked about this before—it’s like, you don’t advertise. It’s all through referral and building reputation. And I’m sure William has the same thing. It’s like, you don’t necessarily advertise. You create content. You show up in places. And so I have not discovered that one magic thing that is driving all of our traffic. I would love to hear what William has to say on the topic.

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, I’d love to have a great answer. There are a few constants, Loren—and this is gonna sound canned—but the best tool that our sales team has is us performing good work. Like, you’re only as good as your last search. And if we’re doing good work, it’s a lot easier to sell. So, making sure our quality control is right, and our deliverables are good. I’ve become much more interested in that as a sales tool than ever before. Another constant—and one of the reasons, I think, Loren, you and I ended up being friends—is we were both big believers in providing good content. You provide good content, and people will listen. That’s like the new magic advertisement.

Beyond that, I’m kind of with you, Sarah. Do you know the seven last words of the church? You ever hear this phrase? I won’t get it. I’ll probably say eight words. But it’s, “We’ve never done it that way.” It’s a common joke in the church. You know, this is supposed to be this maverick thing founded by a young guy who got killed for his teachings and beliefs. And it’s quickly turned into one of the most calcified things in the world. So I’m always telling our folks, “We can’t turn into that old church that will never try anything new. Like, we can’t let that happen.”

We recently did a marketing study of ourselves. Like, what’s worked in the past? When have we seen the biggest growth? And it’s usually when we’re, like, a half a step ahead on adopting a new trend right before anybody else: Twitter right when it came out. I mean, HubSpot when it was a new thing. So we’re now looking for: What is the next new thing, and how do we adopt it a little quicker than others? So I guess I’m a mixture of a few constants: good steady work, great content, and a pattern that has shown up of us finding a new thing and doing it just a little bit sooner than everybody else.

Loren Feldman:
We’re just about out of time. I just want to run one more thing by all of you, which is, I’ve been reading a lot of stories lately about tipping and about how a lot of consumers are getting annoyed by constantly being asked to tip in places where they didn’t used to get asked to tip. None of you rely on tip income, but you’re all consumers of things.

Paul Downs:
I’ll raise my hand. Yeah, it annoys the hell out of me. And I find that the easiest way to deal with it is to use cash. And if it’s a situation where I don’t even have to think about interacting with a person during the actual exchange of funds, I just don’t tip. Like, I order online from a local Indian restaurant, and I’m gonna go pick it up. And they’re asking me for a tip, and I’m just like, “Hell, no, sorry.” If you want more money, raise your prices, but don’t ask me to give you extra when I’m not actually receiving the service. So I’m pretty crusty about that. I don’t like doing it at all.

William Vanderbloemen:
I like to be the best tipper that guy’s had all day. And it’s because I’ve had that job a number of times and you are forever making somebody mad. Either the cook, because you’re asking for something special, or the bartender for the same reason, or the people because you can’t provide what they need. And I mean, it was just one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had.

And it was funny, invariably I’d wait on a table of people who I knew were people of means. And I actually would find napkins where they’d figured out exactly what 15 percent was and not one penny more. And then I’d wait tables and get these huge tips. And I’d ask, “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I wait tables.” So I’ve got a soft spot. And having said that, it bugs me to no end when I go to a pick-up food counter, where I’ve had—there’s been no service—and I’m asked to provide a gratuity. So coming from the guy who loves to be very gracious with tips, it makes me crazy.

Paul Downs:
Yeah, that’s exactly where I am. If I’m sitting down at a restaurant and someone’s busting their butt to get me the food, I understand. It’s a hard job. I’m a big tipper in those—particularly if it’s a cheap restaurant. Like, I might leave 15 bucks on a $20 bill if it’s some little breakfast joint in Lansing, Michigan. Like, why not? That doesn’t hurt me at all. But I’m getting service. It’s when it’s sort of tacked on just to see what happens, that’s what bugs me.

William Vanderbloemen:
I totally agree.

Sarah Segal:
The automated kiosks now, where it’s built into their systems, I think when they first came out, I would just tip because it showed up. I need to tip, and I guess that’s what you do now that we’re out of COVID, because nobody’s touching things, but they still need their tips. But now, I say no. And every time I hit no, I feel guilty. I feel like somebody’s watching me.

Loren Feldman:
Well, sometimes, someone is. You can pay that way in a convenience store or something. And they turn the thing around, and they’re watching you as you hit no. It is uncomfortable.

Sarah Segal:
It is very uncomfortable. And they do at the grocery store near me, too, where they ask you if you want to round up and donate. And I have very specific charities that I donate to. And while I admire the grocery store for doing that. Like, no, I’m not gonna round up, because I’m giving my donation to an organization I’ve given to for the last 25 years. It makes me feel uncomfortable to do that. I think it’s helping businesses facilitating tipping because people don’t carry cash anymore. Like, I don’t have cash in my wallet. Maybe I have $3 or something like that. But it’s very rare that I have cash with me. So I have a feeling that this is helping bring tips back up. That said, also, in my industry, I would love to have tips.

Loren Feldman:
How would that work, Sarah?

Sarah Segal:
Well, we once had a client who gave us a really big bonus at the end of the year. And they’re like, “Yeah, we’re sending you a bonus.” And we’re like, “Never heard of that before, ever in my years of PR.” And they’re like, “We’re really happy with all the work that you did. And we’re just so delighted”—because we had gotten them in Fast Company and a bunch of other stuff. And it was fantastic. It was really like a great feather in our cap.

I think that people hire us as a service. Like, we have clients where, literally, we’re getting them hits every week, and it’s in great places. And they’re like, “Okay, great. Next one.” It wouldn’t be bad to be tipped for an extra good job. I think that it would make my team feel good. Like, we apply for awards, and we win awards, and it makes my team feel good. So I think that if people, my clients, wanted to start tipping us, I wouldn’t be opposed to that.

Loren Feldman:
So we’re kind of coming full circle here. You need to start a PR campaign advocating—

Sarah Segal:
For tipping your PR! Yes, I need that. Not for me, but more for my team.

Loren Feldman:
We’ll check back with you, Sarah, to see how that goes.

Sarah Segal:
I’ll let you know what happens.

Loren Feldman:
All right, my thanks to Paul Downs, Sarah Segal and William Vanderbloemen—and to our sponsor, the Great Game of Business, which helps businesses use an open-book management system to build healthier companies. You can learn more at Greatgame.com. Thanks, everybody.